When the culture of ‘no’ leaves a bad taste

For much of the 20th century, anyone who immigrated to America generally understood they would have to sacrifice some of their beloved foods. That’s just the way it was back then, before import markets were established and U.S. farmers embraced the artisanal approach to animal agriculture and produce.

Roland Passot, chef and owner of La Folie in San Francisco, remembers when he was a 20-year-old cook in 1976 at Le Francais, once the temple of haute cuisine in Chicago. The restaurant’s chef was Jean Banchet, a Frenchman in charge of a kitchen filled with many of his countrymen. Despite being more than 4,000 miles from his Gallic home, Banchet refused to accept the limitations of his Windy City address. If he wanted to serve foie gras, he would find a way to do so in a country with no such duck or goose producers and no legal way to import the fresh stuff from France, where the vast majority of these fat, buttery lobes are produced by force-feeding birds until their livers swell to many times their normal size.

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“We were smuggling foie gras in 1976 and 1977,” says Passot during a phone interview from the Bay Area. They were smuggling fresh lobes, he says, inside the bellies of fish exported from France.

Some 35 years later, Passot finds himself back in the same place he was as a young emigre who spoke no English: He will have to skirt the law if he wants to sell fresh foie gras — or any foie gras, for that matter. On July 1, a statewide ban on the production and sale of foie gras went into effect in California, generating one collective gasp from bewildered French citizens.

This time around, however, it’s different for Passot. His access to foie gras is not limited by a lack of product; America has at least two farms now that produce high-grade lobes. No, the chef’s access is limited because of people like Gene Baur, president and co-founder of the New York-based Farm Sanctuary, which worked with the California legislature to ban foie gras because of force-feeding practices that animal activists consider inhumane.

In other words, animal cruelty is the latest obstacle — along with import bans, scarcity of product or trade restrictions — that makes it difficult for immigrants to get a taste of home. Or for the rest of us to get a taste of their native cuisine.

French resistance

Thousands of words already have been published on the pros and cons of force-feeding ducks and geese, a process known as gavage. The enemy lines break down as you would think: The French and the many gourmands in their camp say gavage is merely an amplified version of a duck’s natural gorging instinct before migration. Animal protectionists view gavage as completely “outside the bounds of appropriate conduct in our society,” as Baur tells me, and say it should be banned.

What neither side disputes — or disputes much — is that far worse animal agriculture practices exist and that foie gras was targeted for one simple reason: It’s a defenseless prey of French origin.

“I would say [U.S. foie gras consumption] is less entrenched, so it’s an easier target,” Baur says. “Most people in the U.S. don’t consume it, so their defenses don’t pop up as fast as with pigs.” (France, incidentally, produces about 80 percent of the world’s foie gras and consumes about 90 percent of it.)